[Image: One of the pieces by American artist Brad Downey in his show, “Reverse Culture Shock,” currently at the gallery MU in Eindhoven, Netherlands. (Photo by Hanneke Wetzer.) Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) Says MU at the Flickr page for all the photos from the show’s opening: “We are living in interesting times – and what a mixed blessing it is! The optimism that swept across the western world after the fall of the Berlin Wall has been replaced by bewilderment. ‘What the [beep/fuck/f**k] is happening?!’ would sum it up nicely.” It adds that the exhibition is Downey’s “most engaged exhibition to date because, as he says, sometimes poetry is not enough.” Hmm.]
From whiskey river:
Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand. And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing…
What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don’t force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don’t understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day.
(Ray Bradbury [source])
…and:
The Poem to End All Poems
If I had to write a poem to end all poems,
it would be the word ‘lonely’
in every language.
It would ask for nothing,
only echo, echo, cry, then sleep.
Please don’t make me write it.
Don’t make me be honest.
Not after all this time, all this
gorgeous pretending.
I have finally spun a story that doesn’t
look like a failure,
and all I want to do is stay in it.
All I want to do is keep singing.
Let me stay in this kingdom without
a name.
The one I made.
Let me sit with my tin crown on my makeshift throne.
Let me do all of it.
Let me fight.
Let me be the dragon and the
spear that kills it.
I would very much like to be both.
(Caitlyn Siehl [source])
…and:
My Segment on the NewsHour
(excerpt)But that is just half the story.
The Gospel of Thomas has what I take to be the full text.The Kingdom of God is within youThomas, Saying 3
and all around you.Split a piece of wood. I am there.Saying 77
Lift up a stone, and you will find me there.The holiest thing then, the kingdom, is inside,
the observing consciousness, the deep core of being,
and outside, the Brown Thrasher, the little girl skipping
over the squares of the sidewalk, the universe itself
that, so far as we know is unlimited.It would be best here to start singing and dancing
for the spacious joy of inside and outside.
(Coleman Barks [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Carried Away
One rainy night we sat in traffic
and, overtired in back, you saw
a wind-whipped grocery bag afloat
beyond the clutch of jagged branches,
swept by gusts and whirled in eddies.
A sudden downdraft swooped it earthward,
where it danced till with a whoosh
a current luffed it past the power lines.
Disowned by gravity, small ghost
not yet snagged by twiggy fingers,
it couldn’t reach the earth. Thin-skinned,
it pulsed, translucent jellyfish.
You wept and pled to be let out
into the dark and slanted rain,
somehow to save that desolate thing.
The light turned green and still you begged,
Go back, go back, on its behalf,
caught and held, bossed and tossed
by a will much greater than its own.
(April Lindner [source])
…and:
The Fatalist
(excerpt)
Time is filled with beginners. You are right. Now
each of them is working on something
and it matters. The large increments of life must not go by
unrecognized. That’s why my mother’s own mother-in-law
was often bawdy. “MEATBALLS!” she would shout
superbly anticipating site-specific specificity in the future
of poetry. Will this work? The long moment is addressed
to the material world’s “systems and embodiments” for study
for sentience and for history. Materiality, after all, is about being
a geologist or biologist, bread dough rising
while four boys on skateboards attempt to fly,
spinning to a halt micromillimeters before I watch them, my attention riveted
on getting tangled and forgetting the name of the chair, for example
and the huge young man, he is covered with tattoos
I think. Life is a series of given situations
of which the living have to take note on site
and the storytellers give an account as the wind
tangles the rain or the invaders take over the transmitter. The exchange
of ideas constitutes a challenge to the lyric ego. And so I am reporting
that I was wrong. A real storyteller never asks what story one wants
to hear, not the happy Joel nor the sleepy
Clara nor the dreamy Jane, the seductive Sam, the sullen
Robbie Jones. Nonetheless I have bought a bicycle. I have to remember
to stop. Thank you. I hope you will enjoy it. A bike that is simply locked
but freestanding will be immediately stolen. Of course
there can’t be much wrong in helping people get what they want
but creeps and purveyors of negativity
and cruelty are tucked into every institution
and most corners and though my inclination is to vote
in favor of everyone’s dearest dreams of advancement I disagree
with the remark that “deathlessness” and “fearlessness” don’t work.
I think they do. “Deathlessness” immediately invokes the “breathlessness” we thought
we’d half heard in the panting of deathlessness whose dashing
is life. “Writhing” is self-indulgent however
but the near-rhyme with “writing” is terrific. Don’t change that. Poetry
can’t be about flight — that would make flight a perching
instead of a flight. When one thing becomes another
the other is free to become something
else. I remember just where
we were sitting
under the influence of the wind
watching a crow
becoming something else in this case
a crow.
The state of milk in jars takes place
and the state of world affairs
can now change. No cereal manufacturer intentionally includes angels
but marshmallow bits may look angelic in a bowl. Who knows? A poem
full of ruptures could be one from which all kinds of things are flying.
(Lyn Hejinian [source])
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